For the uninitiated, spamming occurs when someone, unbeknownst to you, gets hold of your email address and sends unsolicited email to your inbox. Internet marketers and home business owners online should avoid this practice at all costs because the consequences can be dire.
If you’re caught spamming your reputation as a reputable business person on the web will be destroyed and your enterprise will suffer immensely as a result. No one wants to do business with someone who steals contact information and begins soliciting people who didn’t request any information.
Spammers use several underhanded techniques to harvest email addresses from unsuspecting victims. First of all, they approach Internet marketers who they know have sizeable lists and offer to buy their addresses for a price because they know they will most likely make their investment back in very short order. The business people online who sell their customers and prospect’s names without their prior knowledge are no better than the spammers with whom they conduct business.
These spam artists also use spiders which crawl people’s websites and collect any addresses they can find. We all publish contact or follow up email information on our sites for our potential customers and our current clients to use so this tactic can collect a lot of data very quickly.
These unscrupulous people are also experts at speculating or deducing what people’s email address may be. For example gmail, hotmail and yahoo identities can usually be associated with the person’s website domain name or business name and this helps them produce a directory simply through guess work.
Whatever you do avoid spam and spamming and one of the best ways to accomplish this is to make sure you understand exactly what spam is so you will never be accused of sending unsolicited email. If someone doesn’t ask you for more information or doesn’t request you send them a message, then don’t. If you do you immediately join the ranks of the many spammers online.
Another great way to avoid any accusation is to make certain when you’re building your list you use either the opt-in or, even better, the double opt-in method. With the opt-in technique your prospect must enter their email address only once to receive their information. However, with the double sign-up method after they enter their contact information initially you then send them a follow-up email asking them to confirm their request by clicking on a link in the email message.
You can also keep your reputation in tact by investigating any and all businesses you may enter into agreements with, such as joint venture opportunities or swap links, to insure they in no way support spam or indulge in this shady practice themselves. Also, be sure to read and follow to the letter the CAN-SPAM law and make sure all of your outgoing email is tailored toward meeting these requirements.
Something else you must keep a close eye on is the people who unsubscribe from your mailings. Be sure to document their names and contact information and remove them from your autoresponder immediately. Also update your email list on a regular basis to ensure no one remains who requested to be removed.
You’ve worked too hard to get where you are today with your home based business online to see it all come tumbling down around you because of some stupid oversight or because you sent an email without the person’s permission. So by following the guidelines outlined above your Internet marketing experience should be spam free and scandal free and your excellent reputation should remain intact.